


Its Eyes Are for the Stars

by Canaan



Series: How It Could Have Happened [30]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-28
Updated: 2011-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-23 04:42:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/246370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canaan/pseuds/Canaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor thinks he's so old, but Rory remembers two thousand years. Amy/Rory, pre-Eleven/Amy/Rory</p>
            </blockquote>





	Its Eyes Are for the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Part of my How It Could Have Happened continuity, but can be read stand-alone. Takes place prior to "Two Studies for Desire" and between s5 e13 and s6 e4, canon-wise. Expect spoilers accordingly.
> 
> Just to be perfectly clear, nobody in this fic is underage if they are actually getting laid either on the page or in on-the-page references. Author self-rating: hard R
> 
> Thanks to Yamx for the super-fast beta. Disclaimer: I don't own them and I'm not making any money.

_"Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars."  
\--Gilbert Parker_

**No Stars**

For the first few years, Rory ran off anyone who got too close to the ancient stone circle. Most of them didn't want to get too near a Roman centurion in the first place, and those who saw it as a challenge, who assumed there must be something he was guarding worth taking, were dissuaded by the magic of the laser in his hand.

He had a laser in his hand. He didn't want to kill anyone with it, it had done more than enough of that without his say so. But . . . a laser. In his hand. He remembered Leadworth, yes, but he also remembered growing up in Fidentia. He remembered coarse bread and eggs that didn't come from a chicken, spiced fish and porridge, watered wine and honeyed figs. The figs had always been his favorite. He remembered getting drunk for the first time with Gaius Livius and making love for the first time with a woman who wasn't Amy. He remembered snot in a place with no tissues and throwing up in a time with no toilets and bowel movements in the middle of nowhere outside the legion's march.

He didn't remember a laser in his hand. He hadn't eaten a meal since before he found Amy again--hadn't even been hungry. He didn't get cold in the winter or hot in the summer. He could see in the dark, even on a moonless night, even though there were no longer stars. The Doctor hadn't had long to explain what this meant, to be a robot made of plastic who just felt like a man, and there were days it troubled him deeply. He told himself that it didn't matter, that it had its advantages. He had a task--to guard the Pandorica, and lacking the needs of the body only made it easier. He might miss food and drink, but he had someone to care for: Amy Pond, his once and future fiancée. He had a place in the stone circle, standing between the magnificent mausoleum from which Amy would one day arise like a phoenix from the ashes and anyone who would do it harm.

What more did he need?

Four years later (early enough in his long vigil that he still counted the seasons), the first offering appeared: two apples, split down the center and left out at the edge of the stone circle. He couldn't make heads or tails of it, why someone would leave their lunch out like that. He picked up half an apple, inhaled the crisp scent, licked the bruised white flesh. A little warm, but it tasted just as an apple should taste. He wasn't hungry, but he risked the small bite, enjoying his nibble and chewing very thoroughly, wondering what would become of it. He figured it would come out somewhere--perhaps the way it went in. He put the rest back on the ground and went back to check on Amy.

It never did come out, but he took no harm from it. This body he inhabited like a familiar house gone sometimes strange and frightening, seemed to handle it somehow.

The seasons passed, and the offerings continued. He remembered enough of his high school History to wonder if maybe he'd become known as a god, or at least the guardian spirit of the stone circle, like the old springs and pools had been known for having spirits. He told Amy about it, wishing she could talk back to poke fun of him, complain about him getting a swelled head. But she couldn't.

Time went on, and he stopped counting seasons. He spent summer days lying beside the central stone--it wasn't like he was going to get sunburned. He noticed a young woman (just a girl, the part of him that remembered Leadworth insisted--she couldn't have been older than seventeen) with hair the black of a raven's wing coming every day with an offering. He wondered what she wanted. It had been a long time since he'd even spoken with anyone, let alone thought about what seventeen-year-old girls wanted enough to make offerings at a temple or kiss the posters they put up on their walls.

One day, he asked.

He'd learned enough of the local language since being stationed here (only he hadn't, it was programmed into his head just like the rest of his memories of this world, this time) to make himself plain. The first day, she ran away, and the second, too. But eventually, she came nearer to him, and he told her his name and she explained she prayed to the virile spirit of the stone circle for a child.

Virile spirit of the stone circle. Rory laughed bitterly. Virility was one more thing this body didn't do.

Her name was Eirlys, and she'd been three years wed with no sign of a child. Her Roman husband had threatened to put her aside if she could not give him children. She knew other women who had prayed to the spirit of the stone circle and got a child, but few who had seen him. It was like she was talking about someone else, even though Rory knew she meant him.

Eirlys came back for three days. It was good to have someone to talk to who could talk back. She told him about her childhood, her family, her home. He didn't know if telling her about growing up a Roman and becoming a soldier would frighten her, so he told her tales of a fantastic place called Leadworth, where lights came on at a touch and music came from thin air and people traveled faster than the wind in chariots more glorious than any Rome had ever seen.

He hadn't realized how much he'd missed human company.

The fourth day, she didn't come.

On the fifth day, he came up from the Pandorica's chamber to find her laid out on the central stone, her entrails exposed through a hole in her gut very much like that a Roman gladius would make. He didn't need to know who'd killed her to know he was responsible. It's a dangerous thing, being a god.

He couldn't leave Amy, so he buried Eirlys in the stone circle where she'd left so many hopes.

When the real Romans arrived to take the Pandorica, and Rory with it, it was almost a relief. Perhaps where they were going, he wouldn't unwittingly take any more lives.

**Stars**

They get married, the world changes, and then there's the Orient Express. By the time Amy and Rory make it to bed on their "wedding night," it's most of a day later, and they're exhausted.

It's the following night before they get the chance to see if sex is any different after they're married than it was before. Even better, Amy declares, and while Rory's not sure, he's not about to argue. They're curled up together afterwards, cozy in the bottom bunk, when Amy says, "You were plastic."

"I was." The idea is still new to him, and he can't quite get his head around it, even though, if he thinks about it, he can _remember_ World War II, the Black Death, and the Vatican libraries, full of ancient texts stolen during the Crusades. "Nestene duplicate of myself, the Doctor said. Only none of it ever happened, so I don't know how I remember. Two thousand years--I could do with a little forgetting."

She looks into his eyes. "You've got two thousand years in there?"

He nods, because it's easier than thinking about it.

"What did you do?"

He strokes an errant curl of hair off her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. "Protect you. That's a full-time job." He wished all he ever had to remember was that feeling right at the end, where he saw her alive again and knew it was all over, that he'd done well enough.

But Amy has that boundless curiosity, and Rory's always had the habit of picking at a scab. "Two thousand years," she repeats. And Amy--his brilliant, beautiful Amy, who chose him and knew she was lucky to have him--says, "God, it must have been horribly lonely. If you were alone-- Please tell me you weren't alone the whole time."

He doesn't like to think about it. "The world's full of people. Some of them came to see the reliquary holding the goddess who would be reborn."

She rolls her eyes. "Flattering, but not what I meant. Was there anyone who mattered? Other girls? Or, well, boys. Whatever?"

He frowns and shuts the door on the memories, so that, for that moment, there's only Amy. "I refuse to answer that. Wasn't there a 'never ask Rory questions that don't have a right answer' clause in those vows?" He smiles, but he knows his heart's not in it.

It must show, because she holds him tighter and snogs the living hell out of him. When they both have to stop for breath, she says, "There's no _wrong_ answer. It's not about right or wrong. I love you, and I care what happened to you. And I don't want to think about you being alone and miserable for _two thousand years_."

He sighs softly. "I wasn't."

**No Stars**

It took the Emperor's minions a stupidly long time to determine that the Pandorica was no use to them, and Rory was just a barmy soldier who'd been stationed in Britainnia too long and lost most of his marbles. In the end, it was a bloody great box good for nothing but looking impressive, and all Rory would say was that it held the body of a dead goddess yet to be reborn.

Amy, he thought, would laugh and call him stupid, even as she looked embarrassed at the compliment. Thinking about it made him smile.

When the politicians had done with them, the priests and priestesses had a go. With a lifetime of proper fear of and reverence for the gods and a lifetime of not believing in much of anything both behind him, Rory managed to convince them that he was, in fact, a soldier turned priest of the goddess in the Pandorica, who was placed there by a great doctor until it was time for her to rise again.

The temple of Vejovis took them in in the end. There was still status to claiming the Pandorica, even if the Emperor wanted none of it, and Vejovis was a god of medicine. Where else should they have put the relics of a woman entombed by a Doctor and attended by a healer priest?

The years passed. Rory didn't count. Every so often, he heard the name of the new Emperor. Sometimes, he even recognize them from his History classes, but mostly not. He marked time in different ways. Titus Plinius, who thought disease originated in the mind, not the body, and who taught Rory an unusual amount of psychology for a man who technically predated the practice. Fulvia Major, who served Vejovis first and to whom medicine was only an afterthought until Rory taught her asepsis and wound care. He counted not the years, but the friends he passed along the way--good friends, true friends, whom his nature would never put at risk. He served a goddess; that he was unaging was merely one of her gifts. He became the Lone Centurion, a soldier turned healer to keep safe the one thing most sacred to him.

Septimus Grattius was a boy no more than seven years old when Rory met him, and he was dying. It was dehydration, and it was stupid. Rory got fluids into him, made him rest, and kept him on a pallet right there at the base of the Pandorica until he could stand and walk around without fainting. Given a few years, Rory would've forgotten it entirely, but Septimus Grattius never did. He became an initiate of Vejovis as a young man and learned medicine from Rory and anyone else who would teach him . . . but mostly from Rory. The Temple of Vejovis might have been Septimus Grattius' life, but Rory was his love.

**Stars**

They're hiding in a cupboard on Dar al Riyad when Amy demands a story with a happier ending than Eirlys'. "What about the Roman kid? The one whose life you saved?"

Rory saved a lot of Roman kids' lives, but he knows whom she's looking for. "What about him? He grew up. He practiced medicine, such as it was. He grew old . . . well, old for the time. He died surrounded by family and friends, and I missed him when he was gone. What else is there to tell?"

She looks at him like he is the stupidest person on the planet. "He loved you."

Rory shrugs, awkwardly. He can't help thinking that this would be an excellent moment for the Wajerbah to find them. Nothing less shakes Amy when she's on a scent. "Yeah."

She rolls her eyes. "Did you love him back?"

"Why? Would you be jealous?"

She actually thinks about it, which makes him feel better about maybe having to answer. "I was dead, Rory. For 2000 years, I was dead. I know you still loved me, but I was a memory and a hope. Maybe I'm a little jealous, yeah, but mostly, I just want to know. Loving somebody else doesn't mean you loved me any less, yeah? Just like loving the Doctor doesn't mean I'm not _your_ wife."

It's the first time she's ever said it, even if they both knew. Even if being married to her means even more now that he remembers a lifetime where her love wasn't certain, where he was always competing with some handsomer boy or rock star or maybe the Doctor's ghost. After all that, she still chose _him_ and he finds he has to give her honesty for honesty. "Yeah. I did."

Amy nods, seemingly at peace with that, like she just wanted to know. Then she asks, "Were you shagging?"

That's pure Amy, no matter the lifetime. No matter how tender, how emotional, how generally inappropriate the moment, she will always be sexual. It's part of her, and if he loves her, he has to love that about her, too. He smiles. "No. I was plastic, Amy. Some things, plastic doesn't do. Besides--he was a bloke, in case you forgot." That's the easy answer, the uncomplicated answer, and it might even have mattered to him at the time--he doesn't remember clearly.

Nothing about Amy is easy or uncomplicated. "So you were plastic. He wasn't. You should have."

Rory closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the cupboard wall. "Yeah. I know."

**No Stars**

The oncoming wave of conversion to Christianity was a bit concerning, as he and Amy were in the pagan temple business. Emperor Constantine was a bit of a prat, but he built himself a new city in the east, and mainly left Rome alone. When the Empire began stripping priests of their property, Rory claimed the Pandorica housed the relics of Saint Aemelia, seized by a priest of Vejovis in earlier days. He didn't know if there was any such saint, but cults around early Christian martyrs had been thick on the ground for the last century or two. For him, she would be Saint Aemelia, with him a congregation of one.

He got on well enough with the new order of things after that. All the same, he found himself relieved when the barbarians invaded. He wasn't sure what tribe they were meant to be, didn't speak the language, and couldn't care less: the farther he could keep Amy from what passed for civilization in that time, the happier he'd be. He found a man who spoke something like Latin and sold them the line that the Pandorica was a healing artifact of great power, but only if he stayed with it to channel it. He had to kill a few to make the point that he and it were a package deal, but if he'd spent the last few centuries as a healer, his artificial nerves were still hardwired, and his plastic arms remembered how to wield a sword.

He thought they ended up in Germany or France, or maybe it was meant to be Gaul at the time. He supposed it didn't really matter. When the novelty of the healing box wore off, he and Amy were quickly ignored.

Ignored, but not forgotten. Godomar came to him decades later, a chieftain losing his only son, ready to take the Pandorica by force to heal his child. Rory, by then fluent in the local language only too pleased for an opportunity to further fall off the map, said he did not know if the box would heal the boy, but they would try. Days later, after a tedious trip involving a great many rollers and some old-fashioned dragging, they reached a village in the midst of small fields and deep forest, where Rory found a ten-year-old boy sick with fever. There wasn't much to do except give the boy willow bark tea, apply cold compresses, and wait.

He recovered, and Godomar was more than grateful. The chieftain had a small shrine built at the edge of the forest where the Pandorica was housed, and a small house beside that. When Rory protested the house, he discovered he was being gifted also with a wife, Godomar's daughter Clotild, who was all of fifteen years old. When Rory objected that he was no natural man, that he was wed to the Pandorica and its healing powers left him no need of a wife, Godomar said that he would sacrifice Clotild to the goddess of the box, instead.

Clotild and Rory were married, and if he didn't love her, he knew he could not be anything less than kind. It was beyond awkward to explain to a fifteen-year-old girl that he was the Lone Centurion, the guardian of the Pandorica, and he did not have mortal needs. Not for shelter, not for food, and not for sex. He would not age, and he would not die.

Clotild spent her wedding night weeping with relief. She had feared her marriage bed, feared losing her husband to war, feared the death of sons not yet conceived. She had feared Rory, the powerful, immortal healer.

Rory feared what Amy would say when she woke up.

**Stars**

"Did you love her?"

At least it's dark--well, as dark as the TARDIS ever gets--and Rory doesn't have to see the expression on Amy's face as she asks. He shrugs, knowing she can feel the gesture as it shifts his shoulder beneath her head and the mattress under them. "I told her I loved _you_." He gets an elbow in the ribs for his delicacy. "She loved me. I cared about her. I guess, eventually, yeah. Years later, when she took it into her head that I didn't bed her because of some fault on her part, I couldn't bear it."

Amy nudges his hip, and when that doesn't get her whatever response she's looking for, she shifts in bed, swinging a leg over him to straddle him. There's a touch of the surreal to getting a hard on while remembering his other life, but with Amy rubbing up against him that way, his cock has a mind of its own. "So you did," she says.

He nods, though she can't see it in the dark. "Yeah. That's when I gave up. I'd spent hundreds of years alone, no matter how close I let people get. Clotild made me realize that at some point, it wasn't about me--it was about them."

Amy's breasts brush his chest and she licks her way along his collar bone, drawing a soft moan from him. "Tell me about it," she orders.

He laughs quietly at the absurdity of telling his wife about his past very asexual exploits while the two of them are in bed. "You're getting off on this, aren't you?"

"I get off on lots of things. Most of them are you. Tell me."

So he tells her about using his hands and tongue for Clotild’s pleasure. He tells her how he treasured the look on Theoelinda's face when she came. He tells her how very important it was to him to hold Jehan in his arms while the other man spent himself between Rory's thighs.

It might take another thousand years to tell her everything, but he tells her enough.

When they're both sated again, Amy says, "Thank you."

The afterglow befuddles his wits. "For what?"

She kisses his lips. "Being kind."

**No Stars**

The shipwreck was the worst moment Rory'd had in a thousand years. At first he'd thought the Pandorica would sink. He knew well enough by now that he didn't have to breathe, but he had no idea how the Doctor would find them if they were still under water in four or five hundred years.

Fortunately, there was just enough air inside the miraculous box to keep it afloat, if barely. He clung to it with all his artificial strength through the storm. When the day dawned with clear skies, he had no idea where they'd got to or where they might wash up.

When they finally came ashore amidst curious fishing boats populated by people speaking something that was recognizably English, Rory could have cried with the relief if he'd been able to shed tears. Local fascination got him the help he needed to drag the Pandorica safely out of the ocean's reach. The whole time he tugged and strained with the men around him, Rory considered what new tale he might tell to gain Amy just enough protection, without drawing the attention that always ended so badly.

**Stars**

It amazes Rory what they can get away with as newlyweds--as though the act of exchanging rings has somehow intensified the two of them, their feelings for each other, or their sex drives. They've heard the Doctor's footsteps pass them by a dozen times as they practiced the fine art of shagging on every available horizontal surface in the TARDIS (and some that weren't horizontal at all), and Amy swears she actually glimpsed him retreating in that ridiculous bathing costume of his the one time they'd been in the pool.

They're on the sofa in the library when the Doctor finally walks in, muttering about reversing the polarity of something Rory can never later remember and probably couldn't pronounce even if he did. He and Amy both freeze, too shocked even to grab for their abandoned clothing, while the Doctor continues to monologue (or perhaps he's talking to them, even though he really hasn't _noticed_ them) for a good minute and a half before stopping dead and blushing fiercely. He claps a hand over his eyes, mutters "Sorry," and stumbles back out the way he came with his other arm extended in front of him, occasionally running into things.

Amy rests her forehead against Rory's chest and laughs. "He really is just that oblivious," she complains.

"I don't think so," Rory says before he can think the better of it.

She lifts her head to look into his eyes. "Really?"

He sighs, rolls her under him carefully so they don't both end up on the floor, and begins a slow roll of his hips, enjoying the thrill along his nerves and her pleased gasp in equal measure. "If he really didn't notice, he'd have walked in on us before now. And since the Doctor doesn't do courtesy, it's not that. I don't know if he's afraid or jealous."

Amy bends her knees and wraps her legs around his waist. They both groan. "I think he's lonely. And terrified he's going to be married to River someday."

"Marrying River would be terrifying," Rory agrees.

Amy snickers.

"And if he's lonely, well, that's his choice. He doesn't have to be."

**No Stars**

Jack became a regular fixture in the Torchwood warehouse decades before World War I. While his sense of humor was dirty enough Rory should have blushed, and his sense of personal space was nonexistent, Rory was bored enough to appreciate any company. Jack was always entertaining. And he remembered stars.

"I don't know," Jack admitted one night as they sat leaning against the Pandorica, sharing a bottle of apple brandy back and forth that wouldn't make either one drunk, but which made for a very pleasant experience, nonetheless. "The first thing I really remember is pain and waking up with a mouthful of dirt. Torchwood pulled me out of the ground and told me I could be an experiment or an agent. It wasn't a tough decision."

Rory sipped at the brandy, enjoying the sensation of being mugged by a twelve foot tall apple. He let it burn and disappear in his mouth. "But you remember stars, which no one but me has ever seen."

Jack shrugged and stole the bottle back, contemplating its color. "Lots of people remember stars," he said. "Most of them aren't immortal." He sipped, waited, and bumped Rory's shoulder with his own. "I can't help feeling like I remember so much more than I remember. I don't feel like a thirty-year-old man, grown when I was born and unaging. I feel like a spry 600-year-old with retrograde amnesia."

"Maybe you are." Rory took his turn with the bottle, leaning comfortably into Jack as Jack leaned into him. "Stranger things in heaven and earth."

"And you're one of them." Jack's tone held no malice, and Rory didn't take offense. "Don't you get lonely?"

"Sometimes," Rory admitted. "But it's not forever--only another hundred years or so. All the same, the company's welcome."

That was Jack's cue for a snarky comment, but he didn't make it. He didn't reach for the bottle, either. Instead, his hand crept onto Rory's thigh. "How welcome?"

Rory swirled the brandy in its bottle, not fussed. "Doesn't work that way, my friend. You're all original parts, at least as far as you know. I'm mostly not." He put the bottle into Jack's seeking hand, instead. "If you were that kind of lonely, I could keep you company, but that's all it would do for me, is the company."

Jack gave the bottle a rueful look. "A shame. And I'm not. Company like this, that I can be honest with . . . is much harder to find, and worth a hell of a lot more." He took a slug of brandy, coughed a little, and gave it back.

Rory held it high in his hand. "I'll drink to that."

**Stars**

Maybe the Doctor isn't really that oblivious, but he's more than capable of being deliberately obtuse, and it takes Amy and Rory both to corner him. Literally, trapped between the worktop and the kitchen wall.

Amy, Rory thinks, is really on her best behavior: not pushy, very polite, just a very reasonable proposition to someone she loves.

The Doctor doesn't think so. "Centurion, you're supposed to defend your wife's virtue when she gets like this--there's a manual or something."

"I don't need defending," Amy says tartly.

Rory shrugs, content to let them work it out.

"You were seven years old!" the Doctor complains.

"And now I'm not." Amy takes the Doctor's hand and squeezes it in hers. "I need you, Doctor, and you need _somebody_. And Rory--"

"Would kill me in such a way that I don't regenerate, assuming I were interested. Which I'm not. I'm not . . . _like_ that." Rory might almost believe the awkward look on the Doctor's face, but something in the way he stands, the way he seems reluctant to wrest his hand from Amy's and then shoves it in his pocket, says otherwise.

There was a time it might have been true, in sentiment, if not in fact. There was a reason the Doctor had begun asking his permission to hug Amy. On their honeymoon, Rory had still been very much a young man most of the time. But he hasn't been a young man in a while now--that door in his head is open almost all the time. He kept needing to know things behind it, and now he's not sure he could shut it firmly if he wanted to. "I'm an old man, Doctor. So much older than you. Life's too long to spend it alone, and love comes in so many different flavors. Let it be what it wants to be."

The Doctor looks like he doesn't know whether to strangle Rory or kiss him. He takes a deep breath Rory's not convinced he needs, visibly composing himself. "Right, let me try this again. Mr. Williams, are you really suggesting I . . ." his face contorts as he scrambles for a word, apparently unable to make even a euphemism for "have sex" pass his lips. "With your wife?" he finishes, sounding scandalized enough for two.

Amy takes a sharp breath. Rory isn't sure if it's a breath of arousal or of fear that they've pushed the Doctor too far.

He sets a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "No. _We're_ suggesting you have sex with _us_. Not that we'll care about you any less if you decide not to."

"It just seems silly not to," Amy says, far less aggressive about it then Rory'd thought she might be. "I mean, unless you really just don't want to."

The Doctor looks away from her, eyes fixing desperately on Rory. "Rory, you're not like this." There's guilt there that Rory doesn't really understand, but also an unusual lightness to those very old eyes that looks strangely like hope.

Rory sighs, patient in a way he would never have believed possible before he became plastic. He transfers his hand to the back of the Doctor's neck, ignoring the startled look in the Time Lord's eyes and letting their foreheads rest together. "Two thousand years is a long time, Doctor. Long enough to care about a whole lot of people." He thinks about Septimus Grattius and Clotild. "Long enough to see them all go. Long enough I just can't be fussed about how people love, only that they do."

He feels the Doctor's shudder and wonders what it means. "Let me go, Ponds."

Rory lets go. The Doctor's eyes are closed. "Amy," Rory says, and she steps back and takes his hand.

The Doctor opens his eyes and studies them. "Humans. Just when I think I understand you, you change the rules on me."

Amy snorts.

"Er, sorry," Rory says, not sorry at all.

Now that they're no longer blocking his route to the door, the Doctor steps closer, puts an arm around each of them, and hugs them lightly. "Tell me this. Does it matter?"

Rory is sure they've been clear about this, so he's not certain what the Doctor is really looking for. He can feel Amy's hesitation with the length of her body pressed up against his. "Of course not," he says.

Amy sighs, her body settling somehow. "It would be nice, but no, not so much."

The Doctor holds them tighter for a moment, then steps away. He doesn't seem to want to meet their eyes, but he's not nearly as awkward as earlier, either. "Let me think about it. I need to . . . visit some friends. Think out loud . . . to some friends. Or something." He walks backward toward the open doorway, bumping into the frame and looking surprised. "I could drop you in Leadworth for a while?"

Amy freezes. Rory wraps his arm around her, willing her calm, because he's pretty sure it's not like that.

"Or not," the Doctor agrees. "London? Tokyo? Stay on the TARDIS if you like. But no going out, no exploring." He looks stern, and he's looking at them again. "It's not dangerous or anything, just . . . give me a little time."

Amy relaxes. Rory glances at her face and sees her smiling. "We're in a time machine, Doctor. We've got all the time in the world."


End file.
